The US Patent and Trademark Office recently embarrassed itself by granting preliminary approval to a ridiculous application by Dell to trademark the generic term cloud computing. It partially reversed course soon afterward by canceling the Notice of Allowance. The matter has now reached a conclusion: USPTO has denied the application. The letter to Dell, which contains numerous examples of the use of cloud computing as a generic term, is available here.

Janet Willis said,

Unfortunately, mistakes like this one made by the trademark office are all too common. This is partly due to the fact that Trademark Examiners are not always in tune with the particular industry that they're examining. If you think about it, one Examiner can review hundreds if not thousands of different trademarking applications in all different types of industries, and of course no one can expect them to know for sure what names or terms are considered generic within all different types of industries. So that's what the opposition process is for: to allow third parties who know the industry well to come forward and dispute the trademark application if the name is in fact generic.